Not wrong, yet not quite right: Spanish ESL students' use of gerundial and infinitival complementation

This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners’ construction choices are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-idiomatic, and (ii) German learners are overall more attuned to native-like choices than Spanish learners. A preliminary case study suggests that Spanish ESL teaching materials may benefit from incorporating results of corpus-based analyses of authentic language such as the present one. The present study seeks to close the gap between learner language research and ESL teaching materials, and to raise awareness about the gradual nature of second language proficiency.